A large part of this ALP defeat is due to the privatisation of state assets back in 2009. It was a huge broken election promise, which has really stuck in peoples' memories. Federal Labor will suffer the same fate over the carbon tax broken promise. The fact that people aren't huge fans of Tony Abbott might be the only saving grace for the ALP, but if they get Mal Brough to "do a Newman" and run as leader of the party from outside parliament, the Federal ALP might suffer the same fate.

The Labor government up here was nowhere near as bad as it was down in NSW but suffered a much harder defeat. Campbell Newman will have so much personal authority as a result of this victory. I just really hope he uses it to get a lot accomplished. We need to restore our AAA credit rating for starters.

I think everyone up here was surprised not that the LNP had won, but at the sheer size of the win. The seat of Mt Coot-tha was expected to fall from Labor to the Greens, but was very soundly won by the LNP. Seats that were considered safe Labor seats before the election would now be considered safe LNP seats. I've never seen anything like it. It's an amazing victory.

Having said all that, Anna Bligh ran probably the worst political campaign I've ever seen. It started off by replaying the old floods footage, which felt like a cheap emotional ploy. It then progressed into nasty personal attacks on Newman and his family, which ended when she admitted that she had no evidence of misconduct. Finally, it ended with Anna Bligh begging voters to not vote them out too badly. It was quite frankly embarrassing to see the leader of our state beg for us to vote for the ALP only to prevent the LNP from winning everything.

There are so many political lessons here for both sides of politics. Julia Gillard will be hoping that the blood letting today helps satisfy the bloodlust that Queenslanders seem to have for the red side of politics at the moment. Such a resounding win, Gillard will hope, will somewhat sate the anger up here over the carbon tax and the treatment of Kevin Rudd (a lot of Queenslanders still love this man for goodness knows what reason).

Optional preferencing made a huge difference vs NSW. Seats where Alp/green vote could have got them over the line were a walkover for the lnp as a result

Labor changed the laws to optional preferential voting up here a few years ago to hurt the coallition (which it did because in some seats split votes between Liberals/Nationals ended up giving Labor the victory), so the ALP have noone to blame but themselves for it.